


sand and dust, we are and become

by sunshowerst



Series: danny and rusty and no one else on earth [7]
Category: Ocean's Eleven Trilogy (Movies)
Genre: Deeply In Love But We Never Talk About It, Driving, Feelings Realization, Friends to I'll Fake Death To Be Left Alone With You, M/M, Nostalgia, Post-Canon, Suicide Attempt (Kind Of You'll See)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-26
Updated: 2021-02-26
Packaged: 2021-03-17 17:22:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,397
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29720655
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sunshowerst/pseuds/sunshowerst
Summary: Rusty almost dies, and then pretend dies, and in the meantime does what Danny asks of him.
Relationships: Danny Ocean & Rusty Ryan, Danny Ocean/Rusty Ryan
Series: danny and rusty and no one else on earth [7]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2128335
Comments: 4
Kudos: 10





	sand and dust, we are and become

**Author's Note:**

  * For [cleardishwashers](https://archiveofourown.org/users/cleardishwashers/gifts).



> big huge massive shout out to cleardishwashers im gifting every next work starting with this one to you because youre amazing

It's always stuffy in a car that's got a roof, and Rusty hates not feeling the wind the way he knows he would if Danny didn't insist on stealing a less flashy getaway car since the start.

("It's not stuffy, just a placebo," Virgil would probably say. 

"No, he pavloved himself into it," Basher would correct him, and Rusty was glad he was driving away from a job instead of towards it for once.)

Hates more than that, that he already knows the stuffiness to be something else entirely, only ever-present if Danny was as well, in the passenger seat with his gilded cufflinks discarded and the smile of a self-assured heaven-bound monk on his face that Rusty couldn't hack looking at since four stops for gas ago.

It was too little space to be thinking about Danny at all - Rusty loosens the grip he has on the steering wheel, thinned with use like his handle on emotions surrounding this was, and tries not to wonder why Danny's been quiet for the ride, this whole time, even when Rusty unnecessarily ran a red light to get him to talk.

It was his new trick that he learned from her, probably, on their second try at marriage, most likely, which made it all the more irritating (again and probably, exactly what Danny planned it to be. Vicious, he was, ever since the third divorce, and Rusty wished he had at least a ring to show for this.)

He drops one hand from the steering wheel, and knows Danny is fighting his tongue tooth and nail not to run off about car crash statistics and adrenaline high drivers and Rusty's diminished attention span. Maybe his eyebrow is raised, the right one; Rusty won't give him the edge by turning to check for what he's sure to be true.

It's nearly sunset, and the world is a calm, stagnant quiet around them on the forever stretch of highway, a silver river straight and hard that cut through a landscape of rusted and yellowed, as dead as the asphalt was and just as searing, the only sound their car (which wasn't a convertible, which was a problem) and the ones that pass them by every once in fourteen minutes of quiet. Dead.

But they weren't dead. Not yet, not this time. Not that it wasn't close for Rusty. This time, it was a weak link in the plan he didn't want to think about because he was timewasting with Danny and refusing to mix work with play.

Because Danny was all unbuttoned cuffs and even tan on each finger and shrugged back shoulders that made his posture boyish, charming, easy, before marriage easy, before the jobs easy.

Because Danny's hair was moonlit in the day and Rusty never thought he'd see him gray - this was cheating, of course, cause they weren't as old as he knew they won't get to be, but it still was something, and Rusty lost enough somethings in his life to let this one slip like a worn chip between his yet unskilled fingers, back when Danny used to shrug his shoulders back like he was doing in that bar.

Because Rusty didn't really care for the part of the plan that concerned his hairless escape, knowing it was the last plan he'd be going over with Danny.

If the guards weren't declipped by Basher and his sudden, crisis-induced desire to improvise, well. Rusty never stared at the barrel of the gun pointed at him and knew for sure that he was about to die, in a grimy hallway between two grimier diners owned by a divorced couple (for agony, for irony). 

The loud click of the empty gun reverberated across the hall and back like a brass bell that tolled heavy with hapless faith and pierced through his skull harder than the bullet would. 

The shock was a second or two for both him and the security guard that was tailing him and Rusty had the advantage of knowing the floorplans of every public building in the fifteen mile radius of the private collection they hit this time.

Danny waited for him in the getaway car that should've been a convertible cause Rusty needed the air that wasn't like the one in the underused hallway. But Danny couldn't have known that, it just happened. Rusty wouldn't want him to know.

So he drove and kept quiet as Danny did. Felt a drop of sweat roll down his back and a shake in his hand that wasn't on the wheel.

Before he felt anything else or more obvious, his phone rang, and Danny was the one to fish it out of the cupholder.

"Yes. He's driving."

A pause. Rusty’s lungs somehow itch. There are crumbs on the dashboard like asphalt and sand from the kebab he forgot to eat.

"Why would he be- huh. Uh-huh. Okay. Will do. See you next year."

Now its stuffy and quiet and dead and tense, tense was the new one, and it had no way of getting out of their car, not unlike Rusty who rolled the window down further and leaned back into his seat.

What else could he have done?

"Basher says the guard had his gun unholstered, when he walked back into the diner."

It's the first thing Danny said that was directed at him, since they started their drive. Rusty shrugs.

Watches as idly as a driver can, the specks of sand browning the road ahead like sugar on dolloped cream of his favorite cake to buy in Rome. Absently notes that if he had to slam on the breaks when driving at seventy the car this heavy would slide for point three meters longer than a roofless one would.

"Rusty, were you shot at?"

"No."

"You just would have been?"

"Yes."

"If Basher--"

"Mhm."

Another pause. He expects this one to last longer than it did, but Danny was never unkeen to exceed those. Or maybe, Rusty never bothered to set the bar on its holders when it came to Danny, to begin with.

"Pull over."

"We're in the middle--"

"Pull over."

It weighs too much - the tension - anyways. The car cries out at the change of texture under rubber, and Rusty breathes out, when it stops. 

"I'm driving."

It's more of a command than a suggestion, and it's getting hot dark like it only does in July in the desert, and Rusty could deal, with commands. 

He doesn't say anything and Danny isn't smiling anymore when Rusty turns to look at him, one last time through the haze of his eyelashes before drifting off, in dead, in quiet.

-

"Rus. We're here."

Here is a dinky hotel, where no one would look for them, for the night. Even if it wasn't to plan to spend the night and the morning after it anywhere but on the road. 

Rusty doesn't think Danny would trust him with any plan, after the phone call, and _we're here_ was no less of a command. 

"Okay."

"We're rooming together."

"Alright."

"Rusty."

He looks up and Danny shakes his head, instead of getting through with saying what sat heavy on his tongue and shoulders like the tension did on Rusty's. He didn't sleep nearly enough for it.

-

Absently he registers the bed dipping under added weight at the foot of it, and even if he doesn't have a shirt on and his head can easily leave the spot in the crook of his elbow where it's buried, it feels less intimate than the car with a roof and a silent Danny in the passenger seat.

Maybe a testament to how fucked up it all was, or maybe his near-death experiences grew more dull and visceral because he grew more and more old. Or tired. 

But there's a hand, light, on his bare back, the left side of his ribcage. He stills for a beat or two and the hand grows heavier, placating him. Commands could be gestures when it's this close to midnight. 

"You're awake."

He hums, and doesn't move, the warmth of Danny's hand contrasting on his skin against the chill of a stark valley breeze seeping into the room through the window he cracked open while Danny was in the shower.

"I was thinking. You know."

"Retiring?"

"The other thing."

"Oh."

Everything about this job had an air of finality about it. The call, the planning, and the reminiscing during it. Turk's wife calling him, Virgil and Livington's talks barely being about the break-in and security detail, Basher's improvising. Saul wasn't here. Reuben was with him, not here. Linus was just getting started, he had no use of attending a funeral for an era closing and Rusty could meet him after this job anyways - menial, meaningful - for an actual one. For a distraction, anything to get the bitter taste of nostalgia for what was just about to pass him like an undocked ship headed over the horizon line, gliding on hard glinting coins of ocean's skin till he's waving at empty, looking at nothing. 

Danny's laid-back posture. Eyes distant and barely ever leaving Rusty's, like he's stocking up on the sight he won't see again. 

The last group huddle was a goodbye as thieves of their caliber resort to; a glass each of what they preferred to forget themselves to, varying shades of amber and honey gold in hands that held and let go of more money than they'll ever need. Enough to never have to see each other again, for this. 

Rusty didn't refine the link in the plan, the unattended hallway, the undealt with guard.

Linus was good enough on his own, and the whiskey in crystal didn't cut through the petroleum on his tongue or the sinking feeling in his gut at the reminders everywhere that they were - that this was, a museum robbing a museum.

A group of stories and used to bes spun in dirt water and meat and blood he felt every drop of, every curve and capillary beneath his still taut skin crackling and solid and uneasy.

Danny looked at him, in the bar, leaning back and letting his shoulders fall further again, and Rusty knew he didn't want to make it out of here alive and spend the rest of that life looking for looks that would leave him feeling this way, in chock full of smoke bars over the brim of the fourth glass. The fifth.

He doesn't rework the plan. But he survives. 

He doesn't want to hear Danny apologize. Or explain. Doesn't want his hand on his own back. Or his silence.

"I was thinking--"

"I heard you," he says, and feels some of the bitterness coat the words as he does. 

"--you should come with."

 _What?_

He doesn't ask verbally – that was an empty gesture when with Danny - raising his head is asking enough and an effort enough to count as meeting him halfway, and the face that he sees is Dannys serious one, to a dark blue backdrop of their shared room in their shared heavy air. 

"Basher was supposed to fake my death, until you--" Danny doesn't say, _decided to fuck it all to hell, me and you included_ , and Rusty's glad they're not having that talk now, "but he figured, would be easier if he told them to look for you. They saw the blood he planted. Explosions mimick splatters if you're good enough."

Improvising, that's what Basher told him he would be doing. He didn't specify that it'd be for the heist. He didn't specify that it would've been for Danny. 

(Rusty wonders privately, how one goes about apologizing for derailing a plan you weren't aware of by letting your coworker realize you're ready to die of preventable causes. Settles on probably sending an anonymous gift basket. Probably.)

"My body?" 

"Hospital. You didn't make it. Your ashes, however--"

"Hagia Sophia?" Rusty cuts in, bewildered and holding back a snort that Danny lets out. 

"Hagia Sophia."

"Huh."

"Or, you did make it. Depends."

On cue, like everything else in their schemes, Rusty's phone rings, once. 

Twice. 

Again. 

"What do you say?" 

The phone stops ringing. Danny stares at him, expectant. 

"What about you?" 

"I'm devastated, naturally."

"Naturally."

"They never hear from me again. They understand."

"Where do we go?"

Danny grins, and it's this: wild, boyish. Easy. Persuasive without meaning to be, cause Rusty would follow Danny to the world's end or end up aimless if he can't. Faking his death seemed a less dramatic option than bringing it about, anyways - he had nothing in hand to wager against that logic, even if Danny uses it now.

"Remember that extra day I set us back in Belize that one time?" 

Well. Rusty wondered why Reuben was gone as well. Up until that point, that is, when the realization hit him like a steamboat. 

"Oh."

He feels himself begin to smile as well, and feels no need to stifle it because Danny winks at him, like it was that easy. Like it could be.

Rusty reassumes his sleeping position, more than not to keep some of the grin to himself, because apparently, the only detail Danny cared to care for in his plan was Rusty himself. And he was nearly fast asleep again, when he hears him from somewhere across the room, speaking towards a taupe - always taupe - wall.

"Also, Rusty?" And there's no pause this time. "Don't ever fucking, do that. Ever again."

-

He's roused one last time that night, when the bed dips further under now horizontal weight, later, when the dark blue of the room is more dark than blue. Along with that, Rusty faintly notes that he's gotten goosebumps from the desert night cold he finally grew aware of but didn't mind enough to give up fresh air.

"Wh' time is it", he mumbles into his folded arms, and then the hand is back. On his shoulder, this time, thumb kneading into a jutting muscle there well enough to make him sigh. Then, a quiet laugh, barely reaching his fogged-up brain. Probably at the lack of reservations, he'll ask tomorrow. 

"Get some sleep, Rus. You're driving."

-

-

(He thinks to himself that he'll pick up philosophy to try out as a now-dead man; and decide that commands don't count for commands if you're this willing to listen to them. To him.)

(For him.)

**Author's Note:**

> you know the drill - thanks for all the support and the feedback, and thanks in advance if you choose to leave some here as well!


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